2023 Project: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Demonstrating pan-pathogen and pathogen-agnostic genomic surveillance of clinical respiratory disease

What to know

Researchers will work to establish a system for metagenomic respiratory illnesses in a clinical setting. This approach will allow detection of a wide range of disease-causing pathogens at one time and will be optimized for public health use.

Decorative image with words "2023" and "SARS-CoV-2"

Planned activity

This work will be piloted with various partners in public health to address three main challenges:

  • establish metagenomic surveillance for respiratory viruses from clinical cases;
  • establish scalable high-resolution pan-respiratory molecular surveillance; and
  • integrate clinical, epidemiologic and genomic data to produce actionable reports.

Additionally, this project will work to expand this surveillance to additional clinical and wastewater catchments in Massachusetts and to additional specimen types, as well as to extend computational algorithms to improve polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic designs. The activities included under this award will enable rapid and effective public health responses.

Awarded in 2023, this project is still in progress.

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Content Source:
National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID)